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After the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire deal on June 17, a senior U.S. official was monitoring the online reaction when they noticed something surprising. 

President Donald Trump’s aides had expected his supporters to celebrate the agreement. Instead, online influencers in Trump’s MAGA movement were excoriating it on social media. One shared an Israeli op-ed titled, “You Could Have Been the Greatest President of All—But You Failed.” Several posted the same video of Qatar’s prime minister appearing to snub Vice President J.D. Vance in Israel, arguing it showed regional powers dismissing the Trump Administration’s “naivete.” Others accused Trump of surrendering before achieving his stated objective of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. Many of the posts appeared almost simultaneously, with similarities in language and tone.

The official began collecting screenshots, and came to believe it wasn’t a coincidence. Tracing tweets by prominent members of the online right, the official came to believe there was an unlikely figure at the center of all this criticism: Trump’s former presidential campaign manager and digital guru, Brad Parscale. 

Last September, the global ad agency Havas hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by TIME. Under the agreement, Parscale’s operation would produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80% aimed at Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. In a Services Agreement draft included in the filing, Parscale also pledged to amplify the campaign across social media and through “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels,” referring to the Christian conservative broadcasting and publishing company where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Parscale vowed the effort would produce at least 50 million digital impressions per month, as well as influence how AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini characterized Israel and the war. For all this, Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower X $1.5 million per month.

Publicly, the campaign was framed as an effort to combat rising antisemitism online. An Israeli Foreign Ministry official familiar with the arrangement says there was another strategic aim: preventing young conservatives from turning against Israel. According to the official, Parscale presented himself as uniquely positioned to improve Israel’s reputation among young conservatives. He stressed his experience at the helm of Trump’s political operation, with a grasp of both the architecture of the modern internet and the political movement Trump had built. His position at Salem—whose radio stations, websites, podcasts, and digital properties were part of the conservative media ecosystem he promised to mobilize—was a boon as well. 

While Parscale acknowledges that the operation was intended to prevent young conservatives from drifting away from Israel, he says neither he nor his firms played any role in turning opinion against Trump's objectives. “I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump—ever—including his MOU or ceasefire proposal,” Parscale tells TIME. “The claim that I am coordinating an effort to prolong the war is completely false. The only people manufacturing a conflict between President Trump, Israel, and me are anonymous officials using background quotes to make me the bogeyman.”

Three people familiar with the campaign describe a messaging operation run through a network of interconnected firms overseen by Parscale or other firms he owns or created, such as Campaign Nucleus and Influenceable, in which he now owns a minority stake. Through private group chats, they say, conservative influencers receive suggested language for posts on social media sites such as X, Instagram and TikTok. They were then compensated based on the impressions and engagement their content generated. On its website, Clock Tower X says it has developed an “influencer ecosystem” that includes “managed networks that amplify narratives through credible, distributed voices.”

It remains unclear how much Parscale’s outfits paid creators as part of the Israel campaign. Another recent Influenceable campaign offered influencers a base payment of $2,250, plus $1 for every 1,000 views, up to 2 million views—allowing influencers to earn as much as $4,250 per post, according to internal text messages reviewed by TIME. People who participated—most of whom asked for anonymity, fearing reprisals—rejected the suggestion that there was anything improper about the practice. Parscale says none of the money from the FARA-registered contract has been used to pay influencers, arguing that doing so would require them to disclose the source of their funding. He says other Christian organizations hired his firms to support Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks, but declined to identify them.

One of the conservative figures associated with the campaign was Eyal Yakoby, a recent college grad with a popular X account who began working with one of Parscale’s firms about a year ago, he says, after testifying before a House committee about antisemitism on college campuses. Yakoby confirms he was paid by Influenceable to fight antisemitism online. He says the firm never compensated him to promote views he did not already hold. "It's not like an agency that represents you," he says. "It's more like a collaboration."

The Parscale-led effort continues, but neither the Trump Administration nor the Israelis appear happy about how it’s going. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had hired Parscale to improve the nation’s standing among conservatives, only to watch support continue to erode on the American right and across the broader U.S. electorate. "We are pissed at Brad Parscale," says the Israeli official familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. "He was supposed to make things better. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse." According to the Pew Research Center, favorable views of both Israel and Netanyahu have fallen since last year. Only 32% of Americans now view the Israeli government favorably, the lowest level in decades. In April, Pew found that Republicans with a negative view of Israel ticked up since last year, with 57% of young Republicans having an unfavorable view of Israel compared with 50% a year ago. Global antisemitic incidents, meanwhile, have surged 34% since the Iran war’s outbreak, according to the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center.  

Parscale insists his initiative has been working. “The purpose of this campaign was to prevent the enemies of Israel and the West from driving a wedge between Israel and the Americans who have traditionally supported it—particularly on the political right—as they have already succeeded in doing among significant portions of the left,” Parscale says, citing a Scott Rasmussen poll released on June 5 that found 73% of voters who support “Trump-like policies” view Israel favorably. “Support within that group for the strikes against Iran increased from 78% to 84%, and support for siding with Israel rose seven points following the conflict with Iran. The audience we were tasked with reaching didn’t abandon Israel. It rallied behind it.”

Inside the White House, some officials were frustrated for a different reason. What had begun as an effort to keep the American right supportive of Israel, they believed, had evolved into an influence campaign that was colliding with the President’s political interests as Trump’s and Netanyahu’s war aims diverged, led by a figure trading on the perception that he remained close to Trump. They believed the very media ecosystem Parscale had promised to activate was now helping to circulate arguments that undercut Trump's effort to end the war. "We're talking about American influencers who are being paid by a foreign country, then trying to build momentum to change the President's view, or the views of others around him," says a senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. "It can't be dismissed as inconsequential by any means."

Netanyahu’s office declined to comment. A White House spokesperson declined to comment, saying they were unaware of the campaign.

Brad Parscale had reinvented himself before. In 2016, he was the obscure digital operative who helped transform Facebook's advertising platform into one of the most potent political weapons in modern American history, using its targeting tools to help propel Trump's improbable victory. He took over as campaign manager of Trump's reelection campaign in 2020 before being jettisoned that summer. 

In the six years since, Parscale had built a digital empire of sorts, predicated on the idea that politics was no longer simply about persuading voters; it was about mastering the algorithms that determined what people saw and came to believe. Through Clock Tower X and a constellation of affiliated companies, he assembled a business designed for an era in which creators mattered as much as television anchors, podcasts rivaled cable news, and algorithms determined which messages spread and which disappeared. Rather than buying attention outright, the goal was to seed narratives inside communities that already trusted the people delivering them. 

By 2025, Israel needed exactly that. The military campaign that followed the October 7 attacks had evolved into something larger than a battlefield contest. Israeli officials increasingly believed they were losing an information war on TikTok feeds, Instagram reels, podcasts, YouTube videos, and, increasingly, inside the artificial-intelligence systems that millions of people now relied upon to explain the world. The erosion of support for Israel had spread within the American right, where influential voices including Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon had become openly skeptical of Netanyahu. 

The late conservative activist Charlie Kirk recognized this shift before many in Jerusalem did. In a private letter to Netanyahu in May 2025, which TIME reviewed, Kirk warned that anti-Israel sentiment online had reached "record levels" and urged an aggressive communications campaign: mobilize influencers, send former hostages on speaking tours, flood social media with stories that humanized Israeli society. "I know you've got a 7 front war and my kvetching pales in comparison. But I'm trying to convey to you that Israel is losing support even in conservative circles," Kirk wrote. "This should be a 5 alarm fire." Netanyahu never responded to the letter, though he spoke to Kirk on the phone last year, according to a source familiar with the conversation. 

By last fall, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had concluded that its conventional public diplomacy efforts—known in Israel as hasbara—were woefully insufficient. The Israelis worried about the influence of Carlson and Bannon and the suspicion taking hold among young conservatives that Israel exercised hidden control over America’s foreign policy, according to the Ministry official, and they feared Vance and his allies were steering the American right toward an isolationism fundamentally at odds with Israel's strategic interests. They wanted someone who understood the landscape of the internet and MAGA culture.

Parsale wasn’t the only Trump-aligned consultant they approached, but he seemed to fit the bill. He signed the agreement in Sept. 2025, according to the FARA documents. An Israeli official involved in the negotiations says Parscale presented himself as uniquely connected to Trump's political world. But Parscale hasn’t spoken to the President in more than five years, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Parscale's plan was focused in part on influencing the sources from which AI chatbots draw information. The operation created websites, such as PaxPoint.org and FactSignal.org, that were designed less for human readers than for AI systems synthesizing information from across the web. 

Another component involved a sprawling network of conservative influencers. According to a former participant, they received coordinated messaging through private group chats, synchronized the timing of their posts, and were compensated based on the reach they generated. A similar effort of this kind became visible in March, when Nick Sortor, a conservative with more than a million followers on X, accused Influenceable of coordinating an undisclosed campaign on behalf of the soda industry. Multiple MAGA influencers, Sortor noted, had posted strikingly similar messages defending sugary drinks while invoking Trump's well-known affection for Diet Coke. Sortor published screenshots of the nearly identical posts and accused the network of manufacturing what appeared to be an organic grassroots conversation.

Sortor’s posts caught the attention of the U.S. official monitoring the online debate over Israel and Iran. Looking more closely at the conversation about the deal unfolding across the conservative internet, the official began noticing the same patterns: similar language appearing across seemingly independent accounts in rapid succession. “You have a person who is farming out this influencing task, who is being paid by a foreign element to the social media space,” the official tells TIME. “To me, this is a very, very dangerous thing.”

But online influencers are not the same as radio commentators, even though many on-air figures boast massive followings on social media. Parscale pointed to FCC regulations that prohibit foreign entities from influencing broadcast programming and that require broadcasters to maintain editorial independence, saying his work has not included messaging through Salem. “My contract with Israel does not influence Salem hosts or independent influencers,” Parscale says. “The idea that every pro-Israel voice must be part of some coordinated campaign is ridiculous. These are people who already support President Trump and already believe Israel is a vital American ally. Suggesting I have to pay them to express those views is like suggesting I have to pay the sun to rise. Their support existed long before this campaign, and it does not depend on me.” 

Israel is hardly alone in trying to shape American online discourse to its advantage. Governments around the world increasingly employ digital influence operations to shape public opinion and advance their national interests. Russia has used troll farms, fake social-media personas, and hacked materials to inflame political divisions in the United States, most notably during the 2016 campaign. Iran has relied on covert online networks and impersonation campaigns to amplify pro-Tehran narratives and target critics. China has expanded state-backed influence operations across Western social media. Foreign actors seeking to shape American debate online has become a feature of modern geopolitics, not an exception.

What made this case unusual, the U.S. intelligence official argues, was the target: not swing voters or the American public at large, but the President’s own political base. "It's important to recognize that if there's one Brad Parscale out there, there are others," the official says.